Since when did Cultural Anthropology get all hip? A new domain name, “cultanth.org”:http://www.culanth.org/?q=forum has popped up claiming to be that journal’s official web presence and is running Drupal. It includes such cool features as a new aggregator (currently just anthropologi.info and savageminds.org as far as I can tell), and, uh, well, it’s running Drupal, which is cool I suppose. I wonder if they’ll still think it’s cool when they try actually working with Drupal, which is useful only for people who know enough perl that they don’t actually need Drupal. But whatever. The site could have a very bright future ahead of it.
The most interesting thing to me is that the project is outside the AAA’s webspace — in fact, I suspect the quickness with which this site appeared is because the Society for Cultural Anthropology (responsible for CA) decided to shed the cumbersome burden of the AAA. I don’t have any idea how the decision was made, but I do have a few guesses.
/me eyes ckelty
I think this is a good step, but man, there’s nothing there! There’s one forum entry, which is over a month old, and a kind of confused-looking post that, if you click enough things, takes you to alist of articles on Katrina. Judging from the AnthroSource/JStor links on the sidebar, they don’t intend to post CA articles on this site. So what’s the point, exactly? A forum for discussion of articles would be good, though better integrated with AnthroSource — but I can understand if that’s not in AnthroSource’s immediate futire and SCA decided to do it themselves. But then, where’s the content? Anyone who’s started an online forum knows that it takes a huge commitment to get off the ground — you need to open topics, to post “starter” material, etc. — and nobody seems to be doing this work. Is it just too early? Is cultanth.org really just not live, and we jumped the gun posting about it? Or, what?
be fair folks, it hasn’t been announced yet. Yes it’s public, but it’s still an experiment. the SCA board has talked extensively about expanding the kinds of online offerings associated with the journal beyond those offered by Anthrosource. If there are ways to integrate with Anthrosource, the SCA will do it, but beyond that, Rex is right, this is a way for the SCA to try out things that Anthrosource may or may not have in its future. SCA can’t really post the articles on this site–they belong to UC Press–but they certainly can experiment with enhanced versions–forums around articles, extra illustrations and/or media files etc. I think it really depends on whether there are any authors who want to take advantage of it.
Oh, and Drupal… (which is php btw, not perl, but < ?php $snarky_comment=1 ?> nonetheless… it is an opaque project)… be aware that the site is entirely created and run (so far) by one underpaid grad student assistant… and an extremely valuable and clever underpaid gs assistant at that… you would prefer what? Shall we build the SCA Linux distribution now? A Plone site? Drupal is as easy as they get (although Joomla is starting to look pretty good…)
Chris —
I would take umbrage with the snarky comment about php, but since the white space in it breaks the code perhaps it didn’t happen at all 😉
I’m not sure what SCA wants so I don’t know what cms it should use. Joomla has always seemed to me to be overkill, Drupal works in a certain out of the box but is difficult to modify (unless you know a lot of -perl- php, in which case you didn’t need it in the first place), etc. WordPress is quite flexible, etc. etc. My tendency these days is to install different packages depending on the functionality you wanted. We’ll see — I’m in the midst of doing this for a different section of the AAA so we’ll see what happens.
I’m a big fan of using WP as a CMS, there are a number of plugins which make it work quite nicely in this way.
I actually don’t find Drupal to be so hard to modify. I use it for two of my own super-secret research projects, for which there are only on the order of 10s of users–themes are simple to modify in CSS, modules are plentiful–but yes if you want them to do something specific you have to change them–but I haven’t done that yet. What I find frustrating about Drupal is its cult mentality surrounding abstract taxonomies–everything has to be taxonomized, even if it is uncategorized. I’ve taken to using Borges Chinese Encyclopedia for one project. In any case–I agree that installing what you want depending on what you want to do is the best strategy all around–rather than trying to make one thing do it all (like SCALinux will).
First thanks to Chris for the plug, I owe you one. 😉 He also mentions many of the structural conditions within which we work, which is important to keep in mind.
It is just now getting underway. It’s “live” in that we wanted to get the Lipsitz Op-Ed piece out where it was visible and lay the framework for future efforts. It’s “official” I suppose in that it’s being run by the current journal staff (editors, managing editor and editorial assistant) of the journal. Does that count?
We’re working on adding users (we’re at about 20 registered users, and I’m trying to encourage people to use their names, for pedegogical reasons). SCA members can blog on the site, and all registered users can use the forums and post comments on articles. We’re hoping to post more supplemental material for articles and educational material for those interested in teaching through CA.
True there isn’t much up in the way of supplemental material and forum conversation, but hey, the first issue under the new editorship is only just now getting off to UC Press. We certainly have high hopes for the site, but until we get our fist issue off the ground, I suspect we wont have as much on the site as even we would like. Right now we’re working to create lists of articles for educators to use from previous issues of CA. We’re always looking for new feeds which we ought to aggregate, or other bright ideas on how to do this. I’m personally juggling this with doing fieldwork, so my eye isn’t always 100% on the ball.
Drupal was my pick because I know about |–| that much PHP, and Drupal was a known entity to me.
Oh, and culturalanthropology.org and .net was taken:
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY.ORG
ROGGEKAMP 87
THE HAGUE, ZH 2592 VM
NL
Administrative Contact :
DANIELS, ALFRED
NLD
Technical Contact :
Hostmaster, TABNet **
CA, USA
I’d been looking for a nom de blog, and now I have it: skulker! Thanks, Rex! Kind of a mash-up of Scully and Mulder. Kind of. And skulking is definitely my fieldwork methodology of choice…
Anyway: yes, we would like to make Cultural Anthropology all hip, with your collective help. We’ve taken a lot of inspration from Savage Minds, but have a different project: we want the site to be focused on the last twenty years of CA, and the next twenty — or at least the next four, when Kim Fortun and I stop being editors. We can’t post CA articles directly, because of that little Anthrosource thing, but we can embellish, supplement, mutate, and extend them. Where the site goes really is experimental and, as ckelty sez, depends on what people can come up with.
We couldn’t run anything like this on the RPI servers, so renting our own little portion of the noosphere was an obvious choice. Casey’s Da Man as far as we’re concerned, since we know jack about platforms — but are learning…
Oops — looks like I’ve crossed the line from skulking to blogging. Come visit (it’s culanth.org, not cultanth) and play…
At K-State we have been experimenting with variuos CMS platforms (Xoops, Drupal, and Joomla) in an effort to create an online community for our Anthropology Club. We finally started using simple WordPress layouts (like Savage Minds). We then take it one step further by collecting feeds in a Netvibes tab which we then publish and post to our blog. Students just click a button and have a fully customizable page that includes a chat room, Google calendar with club events, “live” Flickr viewer, a Diigo bookmarks viewer (which shows any bookmark saved “ksuanth”) and several important anthropology feeds. As noted above, it always depends on what your goals are. We are trying to simply augment our real community with online tools – so this works out pretty well. Our main blog (ran by our undergrads) is here: http://www.mediatedcultures.net/anthclub. One of the early postings has the Netvibes tab we published, which can be viewed by clicking on the button in the post. This is primarily for KSU students, but I thought I would share it with you all in case you want to set up something similar for your school.
Awesome Mike — the Netvibes tab is a great idea as well!